Comcast Cable executive and Southington native Tom Wlodkowski was back in Connecticut recently, at the Xfinity Store in West Hartford, showing off a new "talking guide" for vision-impaired TV viewers.

It's a TV that tells you what's on.

Instead of viewing the available programs by scrolling through a menu of shows, you hear a voice read the program options to you.

And if you're blind, like Wlodkowski, that's a very useful thing.

"Until now that was not possible," said Wlodkowski as he chose the trailer of the movie "Maleficent" on the demo TV.

"I had to be able to see the screen and I always wonder why my wife and son took forever to find a movie to watch on a Friday night," Wlodkowski joked. "And so now that I have control I'm still overruled what we watch — but at least I know what I would watch if I could."

The service will help blind or visually impaired customers navigate Comcast's Xfinity X1 TV platform.

"So there's a myth that blind people don't watch TV, which is absolutely false," Wlodkowski said. "People who are blind or vision-impaired watch as much TV as anyone else. And they want to watch more of it. And now with the 'talking guide' they can."

Without installing more hardware or software in the set-top box, customers can tap the "A" button twice on the remote control to activate the guide. The voice will speak to them.

Once he pressed the "A" button twice, Wlodkowski had a choice of turning on the voice guidance. With the guidance, he moved through the Xfinity menu by tapping the left and right arrow keys. The female voice announced the highlights on screen. When he chose a program, the voice read out loud the title, the channel number, the remaining time of a TV show or a movie, and its rating.

Wlodkowski graduated from Boston College with a bachelor's degree in communications. He worked for AOL Inc. for more than a decade before joining Comcast in 2012, when he was hired to work on the support team developing products and services for people with disabilities. It took the team about 18 months to develop the "talking guide." He is now vice president for audience.

The biggest challenge of the project was finding a way to convey a visual grid in an audio format without access to a keyboard, Wlodkowski said.

The "talking guide" in a beta testing phase with 20 trial customers nationwide, Wlodkowski said. The company aims to enhance the interface speech rate and voice variety before bringing the service to a wider audience by the end of the year.

Comcast said the "talking guide" will be the first voice-enabled television interface in the media and technology industry. The feature is expected to be available to the 2.5 million homes that have the X1 platform.

In the audience at last week's demonstration was Stephen Thal of Hartford with his assistant golden retriever Keena.

"The stuff had to be read to me, or, you know, I couldn't get the information," said Thal, referring to his previous experience as a blind TV customer struggling to win his family's TV battles. "But doing what Tom developed, it's really been a great help to me. I can become more independent. I can pick the program I want if I win a few this time."

Allen S. Gouse, Ph.D., president and CEO of Easter Seals Capital Region & Eastern Connecticut Inc., said the feature's potential consumers should be more than folks with visual disabilities.

"For any kind of disabled condition, where the written word could become a barrier, this becomes a resource," said Gouse.